Pete Seeger and Philip Seymour Hoffman both died this week, one’s life more than twice as long as the other; one the quintessential optimist, the other an unwavering pessimist; both talented and brave artists whose gifts went way beyond the technical. They touched people.

Their deaths, bookending the week, put a pall on it.

While there are only two shows opening on Broadway in all of February, there are more than a dozen Off-Broadway, some hotly anticipated. Both Broadway Week and Off Broadway Week/20at20 discounts are still in force, although only for a few days more.

This week I reviewed the Rude Mechs at Lincoln Center and the New Group’s latest Thomas Bradshaw provocation, “Intimacy.” I also interview avant-garde theatrical royalty about her latest play, which takes place in a pool.

Stop Hitting Yourself,” playful chaos brought to you by the acclaimed Austin theater collective Rude Mechs, is the first stage show I could call cheesy and not mean it as an insult: Before the play begins, a half-naked man is lying unconscious on his side with cheese dripping towards his navel. Near the end of the play, the seven performers smear cheese all over each other, most of it taken from a working fountain on stage that spouts queso. In-between, every now and then, somebody on stage eats some nachos.

Lincoln Center describes this show, which it commissioned for its experimental LCT3 and which runs through February 24th at its Clare Tow Theater, as “part Pygmalion, part Busby Berkeley, part self-help lexicon.” I wouldn’t describe the play this way, actually – although, yes, the half-naked man is eventually dressed on stage in a tuxedo; there’s some tap-dancing and a few songs; the audience is asked to repeat the words “improvement,” “charity,” and “queso.” But there is so much else stuffed into this 90-minute show – audience participation, meta fiddling around, digression upon digression — that “Stop Hitting Yourself” is hard to sum up.

“Pool Play” is immersive theater taken to a literal extreme – everybody, actors and audience, is immersed in water. Conceived and directed by Erin B. Mee, the fully-scripted play will take place in the Waterside Pool at 25 Waterside Plaza from February 7 to March 8, 2014.

I talked to Erin Mee, daughter of pioneering avant-garde playwright Charles Mee (who contributed monologues to “Pool Play”) about her father’s influence, about whether her career as an academic enhances or detracts from her life as a theater artist, about the trend in immersive theater, and how she thinks theatergoers will react to this underwater experiment: “People we have talked to love the idea of putting their feet in the subject of the play.”

29

The producers of King Kong, an Australian musical, have announced plans to move into Broadway’s Foxwood (former home of Spider-Man:Turn Off The Dark) in December.
Nederlander pays feds $45K fine & agrees to make its theaters more accessible to the disabled. (Gershwin, Brooks Atkinson, etc.)

Richard III Camping Goods: “Now is the Winter of our Discount Tents.” (Shouldn’t this be illegal?)